Ten Problems of Bodily Ownership

Three TEN PROBLEMS OF BODILY OWNERSHIP

The body is a material entity located in space and time in the same way as a rock, a tree or a bird. But do we perceive and experience our body like those other objects? Most philosophical interest for bodily awareness has come from its peculiarities. It is precisely because we assume that we are aware of our body differently from other objects that it raises many questions. But what makes it unique? The most intuitive answer is that it bears a special relation to the self, and to self-awareness. Yet, although introspectively familiar, it is hard to exactly pinpoint the nature of this specific relationship. Thanks to their privileged relation to our body, bodily experiences seem to afford awareness of our body as being our own, what has been called the sense of bodily ownership, for want of a better name. In my monograph, Mind the body, I explored what it takes to be aware of one's body as one's own but I had to face a number of issues, many of which are still unresolved, and since then, new ones have raised. The aim of this chapter is to offer a very brief outline of the main questions and puzzles that await those interested in bodily ownership. I have picked ten of them, to echo Michael Tye's famous Ten problems of consciousness, but there are many more, I am afraid, and each problem raises major issues that deserve much more than the space allocated here.

Three point one. The problem of the first person

What is the difference between seeing and feeling one's legs being crossed? One could say that vision gives access to many legs besides one's own whereas proprioception is self-specific: it does not give information about any other legs than one's own. Because of this difference, one can be mistaken about whose legs one sees, but not about whose legs one feels. In more technical terms, proprioception along with other ways of gaining information about the body from the inside (touch, pain, interoception, etc.) grounds bodily self-ascriptions that are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first person. This difference between vision and proprioception is epistemic. It concerns the type of knowledge the sensory experience can ground. There is also a phenomenological difference. Merely seeing one's legs does not make one experience them as one's own. One can believe that they are one's own but this is not the same as to have a sense of bodily ownership toward them. Only when one experiences one's body from the inside does one experience one's body as one's own. But what is at the source of this first-personal character of bodily experiences?